Jan 1, 2019
I want you to stop supporting Trump. Seriously.
Stop it right now.
You can like the president. You can love the
president. You can agree with the president’s judicial and
cabinet appointments, his handling of the economy, foreign affairs,
domestic policies, and the like. Heck, you can even adore his
outlandish, brash tweets both before and after becoming
president. But, for the love of all that is good and holy,
please stop supporting the president!
I suppose I could understand how someone who agrees with what
the president is doing would say they “support” him, just as
someone who disagrees would say they “oppose” him. But—to be
honest—it’s never really crossed my mind to support or oppose
Trump. Quite frankly, I believe doing either is a dangerous
oversimplification of our civic duty.
Perhaps you’re thinking I’m getting all hung up on some
trivial semantic. What difference does it make? Well,
there was a time when expressing support of a president would have
simply been understood to mean one supported the president’s agenda
as it was currently understood and would likely vote for them
again. but that does not appear to be a valid option in
today’s political climate.
Words and their meanings do evolve over time. We no
longer presume that someone described as “gay” refers to their
jolly disposition. Calling someone a “liberal” today means
something quite different than it did in the early days of the
American republic, when “liberal” referred to support for natural
rights and government of the people over authoritarian
monarchy.
And in the context of our current political climate it is
extremely important we discern what being a “Trump supporter”
actually means. I don’t mean that it’s meaningless to support
the president; but I do mean that the way in which that word is
commonly used today carries with some dangerous connotations.
Namely, “support” isn’t specific enough and, more and more, it’s
coming to mean unquestioning fealty in a manner that was never
required of conservatives in the past.
In this episode I take a deep dive into the shallow politics
surrounding the support/oppose model of looking at the president
and examine why this way of looking at the world is contrary to the
conservative worldview.